The Rich Don't Always Win

The Forgotten Triumph Over Plutocracy That Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970

The Occupy Wall Street protests have captured America's political imagination. Polls show that two-thirds ofnbsp;the nation now believe that America's enormous wealth ought to be "distributed more evenly." However,nbsp;almost as many Americans--well over half--feel the protests will ultimately have "little impact" on inequality innbsp;America. What explains this disconnect? Most Americans have resigned themselves to believing that the richnbsp;simply always get their way.

Except they don't.

A century ago, the United States hosted a super-rich even more domineering than ours today. Yet fifty yearsnbsp;later, that super-rich had almost entirely disappeared. Their majestic mansions and estates had becomenbsp;museums and college campuses, and America had become a vibrant, mass middle class nation, the first andnbsp;finest the world had ever seen.

Americans today ought to be taking no small inspiration from this stunning change. After all, if our forbearsnbsp;successfully beat back grand fortune, why can't we? But this transformation is inspiring virtually no one. Why?nbsp;Because the story behind it has remained almost totally unknown, until now.

This lively popular history will speak directly to the political hopelessness so many Americans feel. By tracingnbsp;how average Americans took down plutocracy over the first half of the 20th Century--and how plutocracynbsp;came back-- The Rich Don't Always Win will outfit Occupy Wall Street America with a deeper understanding ofnbsp;what we need to do to get the United States back on track to the American dream.

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That was due to all the good things FDR was responsible for, although Louis Brandeis, once one of the good guys, stood in his way as a Supreme Court justice, interdicting the full enactment of FDR's New Deal. All those congressional investigations while FDR was in the White House, proving how Rockefeller secretly shipped oil to the Nazis during World War II, via Switzerland and Spain, how Mellon and du Pont conspired with I.G. Farben, Morgan's financing of fascist Italy's invasion into Libya; the investigation into the concentration of corporate ownership by the banks (Temporary National Economic Committee, or TNEC study), leading to the lawsuit brought by the federal government against the Wall Street banks (17 in number), &quot;U.S. v. Morgan et al.&quot; - - all historical facts most Americans are ignorant of today. [Although I love Sam's writing, and we share the same mindset and values, I disagree with his overall thinking, as did the congressional study on how the super-rich hide their wealth and ownership via foundations and trusts (and today offshore finance centers and offshore trusts) by Wright Patman, published circa 1967-1968.]